Fashion Blog : High Street Luxe Find : Vegan Leather Dress £22.99 UPDATED

This vegan leather dress at New Look is chic and perfect for the transition between winter and spring, it looks great with opaque tights and ankle boots, finished with a nice chunky knitted scarf. The simplicity of the no fuss design lends itself perfectly for day wear.

The hems are unfinished. I would leave the neckline and sleeves unfinished, but I would use some fabric glue and add a neat single hem on the bottom. The fabric is thin and may stretch oddly at the bottom when you are sitting down without the extra strength of the bottom hem. The bust area has a shape sewn in at the sides by means of darts, this means that this dress will only hang correctly on a smaller bust size a - c.

I am not expecting this dress to last as many years as a dress priced at 20x £22.99, but with regular wear with care I would expect to get a good year from this piece.

New Look Leather Look Dress UK UK £22.99 / Europe €29.99 .
New Look ships worldwide and offers free delivery options.

New Look Vegan Leather Dress 2014

This dress is similar to the Rag & Bone NY dress I posted about a couple of years ago (pic below). A true classic in a very different price bracket (£650) to this New Look cheap & chic alternative.

Rag & Bone NY Leather Dress Circa. 2012

Why I now choose vegan leather

In June 2013 I made the decision not to buy anymore real leather clothing. I had researched extensively where leather comes from today. It's not a fashionably pretty or happy story.

Years ago leather came as a by product of the meat industry where cows and other animals were raised naturally outdoors, fed well and treated well as living beings with most of the leather coming from the UK, Europe and USA. Leather clothing was not sold everywhere and if it was for sale you would only see a few pieces per season. Leather was carefully purchased and cherished for years.

Now leather is available cheaply and excessively in most high street stores. Cheap leather comes from India and China where animals are bred solely for this purpose and lead a life of extreme cruelty, sadness and deprivation before being slaughtered in the worst conditions (more info here). Some leather still comes as a by product of the meat industry but again the way the animals are raised in factory environments and intensively without seeing the light of day, effectively being raised in a concrete prison environment is not something any intelligent person would wish to buy into at any stage of the chain.

Sign the PETA petition here, it's free and only takes a minute to help stop this unnecessary cruelty.

Vegan leather has improved significantly since the plastic-like PVC of the 1980's and 90's. Today vegan leather or faux leather is soft, wearable most importantly looks like leather.